Last January, Mel Gibson told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly
that “forces” were seeking to prevent his making a movie about Jesus’
Passion. If so, there was no sign of them in the news media, which up to
that point had given the project minimal coverage and no criticism at all.

Gibson may have been indulging in the kind of fantasy
that seems to possess his father, who, according to Christopher Noxon’s
March 9 article in the New York Times Magazine, believes that the
Second Vatican Council was a “Masonic plot backed by Jews.” Or maybe, as
New York Times columnist Frank Rich suggested September 21, Gibson was
“looking for a brawl,” the better to market his film. In any event, a
casus belli was soon at hand.

In April, a group of scholars (including two priests, a
nun, a practicing Catholic layman, a rabbi, and two Jewish women—one of
them, me—who belong to Orthodox synagogues) convened by Eugene Fisher of the
U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) sent Gibson an 18-page report
on his screenplay for what is now being called The Passion of Christ.
The report pointed out historical errors in the script and, as committee
member Paula Fredriksen would later write in an extensive account of the
affair in the July 28 New Republic, “since Gibson has so trumpeted
his own Catholicism—its deviations from magisterial principles of biblical
interpretation.”

For his part, Gibson consistently affirmed that
he was presenting the Passion “just the way it happened. It’s like traveling
back in time and watching the events unfold exactly as they occurred….We’ve
done the research. I’m telling the story as the Bible tells it.” (NewsMax
Wires, March 10)

How the screenplay had come to the offices of
the USCCB was a bit mysterious, although Gibson knew we had it and expressed
great interest in reading our report. After he saw the report, however, his
production company threatened to sue the USCCB and the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL) for “stealing” the script.

“They were more or less saying that I have no
right to interpret the Gospels myself because I don’t have a bunch of
letters after my name,” Gibson told the London Observer September 28.
“Just get an academic on board if you want to pervert something.” The
evangelical movie critic Ted Baehr, writing for the conservative Internet
news service NewsMax.com May 19, asserted that Gibson had “consulted the
Vatican about the movie…and travels frequently to Rome to confer on
theological details.” Whom Gibson conferred with at the Vatican he did not
say—nor, so far as I can tell, has Gibson ever publicly claimed to have done
so.

Nor did Gibson himself make this claim. Then
again, as committee member Mary Boys told the Albany Times Union
September 19, Gibson “wouldn’t know a scholar if he ran into one.”

Gibson and his supporters in the media and
elsewhere succeeded in framing the discussion as a culture war. In one
corner were “egghead perverts” who “falsely represented themselves as a
committee of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.” (NewsMax.com
columnist Phil Brennan) We were, in due course, joined by: the
“anti-Christian entertainment elite” (radio talk show host Laura Ingraham);
“an elite media” seeking “to destroy” Mr. Gibson (Bill O’Reilly); the
“forces of censorship” comparable to those of the Inquisition and Soviet
Russia (conservative activist David Horowitz); and “modern secular Judaism”
that “wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church.” (Gibson himself)

In the other corner stood two billion
Christians, whom, as Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of
Evangelicals, put it, “Jewish leaders…risk alienating” by protesting a movie
about Jesus.

“The big winner in this is Mel Gibson,”
Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights president William Donohue
aptly if disingenuously noted on NewsMax.com September 18. “The big loser is
the ad hoc committee of scholars who condemned the movie without seeing it.”
In fact, the committee never condemned the movie (since Gibson would not
allow any member to see it), and kept its report confidential (it was Gibson
who publicized it, along with his response).

Almost from the beginning of the public
discussion, Gibson supporters directly and indirectly called into question
the scholars’ bona fides. In April, Zenit, a Rome-based news agency
dedicated to covering the Catholic church, gratuitously pointed out,
“Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt University describes herself as ‘a Yankee
Jewish feminist…with a commitment to exposing and expunging anti-Jewish,
sexist and heterosexist theologies.’” Zenit failed to mention that the
Catholic church has committed itself to standing against sexism,
anti-Judaism, and hatred of gay people.

Pro-Gibson commentary conscientiously refrained
from listing the academic positions and titles of the scholars’ committee.
(Where Zenit omitted my title—“The E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter
Professor of New Testament Studies”— it identified the Gibson supporter who
translated the script into Aramaic and Greek as “Jesuit Father William J.
Fulco, National Endowment for the Humanities professor of ancient
Mediterranean studies.”) The Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung simply
referred to me as a “militant theologian.”

When, on “The O’Reilly Factor” August 11, Rabbi
Marc Gellman pointed out that Gibson would have done well to show his film
to those who were not immediately predisposed to support it, his host
replied, “I don’t send advance copies [of my books] to…people who hate
me…who will poison the well against me.” The metaphor was telling, inasmuch
as Christians commonly accused Jews of poisoning wells during the Middle
Ages. On September 15, O’Reilly made a slip that was also telling, referring
to committee member Fredriksen as “Fredrikstein.”

James Hirsen, another NewsMax.com writer, on
June 16, condemned committee member Phil Cunningham for stating that it is
“impossible to do a film based strictly on the gospels…[because] they
disagree with one another.” Cunningham, of course, was correct: The Last
Supper is either a Passover Seder (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) or it is not
(John); Jesus either carries his own cross (John) or he does not (Matthew,
Mark, and Luke); there is no disciple at the cross (Mark) or there are
several (John), etc. Each Gospel offers its own perspective. Hirsen
concluded that “the devil” has “gotten into these people.”

In the New Statesman of September 22,
Andrew Stephens wrote, “Christian academics are now divided on whether the
Gospels should be seen as indisputable historical fact or merely symbolic
guidelines to Jesus’ life.” The either/or formulation was erroneous: All but
the most conservative scholars see the gospels as a combination of
historical reporting and theological reflection.

This same mistaken dualism underlies the
frequent but false report (e.g., NewsMax.com, September 15) that the
scholars objected to “the fact that Gibson was basing his film on the
Gospels, which they view as unreliable.” The bulk of our report concerned
the script’s anti-Jewish material derived not from the New Testament but
from the visions of a 19th-century German nun who also promoted the obscene
“blood libel”—that Jews kill Christian children and use their blood to
prepare matzo, the unleavened bread eaten during Passover.

Speaking on “the O’Reilly Factor” September 15,
Peter Boyer (author of a lengthy New Yorker article on Gibson)
asserted that the scholars “excuse themselves from the question of Jesus’
divinity…so any dramatization of Christ’s Passion that is based on the
gospels is going to be objectionable for them on its face.” (On June 13,
NewsMax.com had described the scholars as “feverishly working on a rewrite
of the New Testament.”)

In her New Republic article (“Mad
Mel—The Gospel According to Gibson”), Paula Fredriksen described the
script’s numerous nonbiblical, ahistorical scenes, from the construction of
the cross in the Jerusalem Temple to the association of Jews with money, to
the absence of “good” Jews. She also remarked on the potential of the movie
to inflame anti-Jewish views, especially in parts of the globe where Jews
are already hated.

In response, David Horowitz labeled her an
“ignorant bigot,” and called the report not only an “effort to shut down his
film before it opens” (which it wasn’t) but also “just another station of
the cross.” Donohue also called Fredriksen a demagogue, while Phil Brennan
accused her of arrogance, censorship, and hubris.

Nor were such comments restricted to the
right-wing media. A July 30 editorial in Variety castigated
Fredriksen’s article as “irresponsible” and asserted that she and her fellow
committee members were “ideologues and pedants” as well as “bigots” out to
stifle freedom of expression.

“One problem with the media frenzy regarding
the interpretation of the Passion of Jesus in Mel Gibson’s forthcoming
film,” Mary Boys told the Albany Times Union September 24, “is that
so many in the media seem to lack basic knowledge of religion.” Even
balanced accounts of the controversy sometimes got basic facts wrong; for
example, People magazine asserted that a Pharisee “was forbidden to
touch a corpse.”

Amidst this anti-intellectual (to call it
nothing else) hoopla, the scholars committee was on occasion treated fairly,
notably by the New York Times (in particular Laurie Goodstein’s
August 2 article on the controversy).

Perhaps because Gibson’s movies, Braveheart
and The Patriot, do not express great love for England, the English
press was comparatively more attentive to the scholarly critique. On August
13, for example, the Manchester Guardian Weekly managed to quote Mary
Boys and Paula Fredriksen accurately and extensively. On September 28, the
Observer gave extensive play to committee member John Pawlikowski’s
account of specific historical errors in the script.

From the April story in Zenit until the end of
June, much of the criticism of the committee in the media focused equally on
the Catholic and the Jewish scholars or actually concentrated on the
Catholics. But after the ADL issued its first public criticism of Gibson’s
project on June 24, the tide shifted. From then on, the opposition began to
be seen principally as “Jewish groups” or simply “Jews.”

Conservative critics made a practice of citing
“Orthodox Jews” who spoke of the film’s fidelity to the gospels. Orthodox
Jews, however, don’t tend to be experts on the New Testament, and these
happened to be familiar conservative ideologues like movie critic Michael
Medved and radio talk-show host Rabbi Daniel Lapin.

In National Review Online, Lapin
speculated that the lack of “Jewish organizational protest over the release
of The Gospel of John” might have had something to do with the Jewish
“ethnicity of the producers.” Then, after noting that the producers were
Jewish, Lapin asked, “If Jews quote the Gospel it is art, but if Mel Gibson
does the same, it is anti-Semitism?”

But there was a critical difference between the
films: Gibson claimed historical accuracy while The Gospel of John,
using only the words of the gospel, claimed to be nothing more than an
enactment of…the Gospel of John. It’s also worth noting, though Medved and
Lapin did not, that a number of biblical scholars served as consultants to
the John film, just as they have to the last several Passion plays in
Oberammergau.

Meanwhile, the role of the USCCB in convening
the scholars committee tended to disappear. On August 8, CNBC’s Kelly
O’Donnell introduced Mary Boys with the lead-in, “The Anti-Defamation League
asked several biblical scholars to review the script.” The Washington
Times put it more bluntly July 7: “Catholic scholars at the ADL.”

Eventually, the committee dropped out of the
media accounts, leaving only the “Jews” as the force aligned against Gibson.
Thus, on August 17, the Queensland, Australia Sunday Mail explained
that Hollywood was reluctant to touch the project because “many of the most
influential people in the film business have Jewish origins. From the
outset, they have been seriously worried that the film paints an
unsympathetic picture of the Jews.” A columnist in Melbourne’s Herald Sun
described Gibson as having to bend to “the power of the Jewish lobby.” In
fact, no specific “Hollywood Jew” was ever cited as saying anything negative
about the film.

In his November 3 column for the Chicago
Sun-Times, Robert Novak warned that the apparent failure of “a campaign
by some Jewish leaders to radically edit the film, or, alternatively,
prevent its exhibition” could lead to public protests when it opened. “The
ADL carries a heavy burden in stirring religious strife about a piece of
entertainment that, apart from its artistic value, is of deep religious
significance for believing Christians,” wrote Novak, who had been given an
opportunity to see a rough cut of the film.

Not only was The Passion not
anti-Semitic, but according to Novak “complaints by liberal Bible scholars”
that the film “is not faithful to Scripture are rejected by the Vatican.”
Novak’s Vatican authority was Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, who heads the
Congregation for the Clergy. Significantly, Cardinal Walter Kasper,
president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity,
subsequently called his colleague’s remarks “purely personal.”

The poor coverage of what we scholars did and
why has to some extent been our own responsibility. Even after negative
comments about the committee—and me, in particular—surfaced, I did not agree
to speak with the media on the record, because I still believed that the
report was a confidential document for Gibson alone.

Then there was the gap between the classroom
lecture and the media sound bite. When Paula Fredriksen contends that “the
true historical framing” of Gibson’s script is not early first century Judea
but “post-medieval Roman Catholic Europe,” her comment cannot be expected to
have much impact on readers who see no reason to presume that post-medieval
views of Jesus’ death would be any different from the first
century’s—especially if they believe the gospels to be eye-witness
testimony, much less inerrant products of divine inspiration.

“One of the problems is that people are going
to see this film and are going to conclude that’s the way it is because they
don’t know anything different,” Mary Boys told the Jewish Week of New
York September 19. “We really have to find ways to educate them about
interpreting scripture more thoughtfully.” Here is where greater
collaboration between the academy and the media is needed, if only we would
talk more with each other, and if only Mr. Gibson would deign to show us his
film.